“...the Prime Minister himself wishes to use
as little as possible in political speeches the word
"appeasement" which is now open to considerable
misconstruction.
—
“Rational calculation would stop Germany going
to war at all. Chamberlain explained in July 1939 'what
Winston and Co. never seem to realise...” [pp.
292-293, Chamberlain and appeasement]

“Labour said ‘Yes’ to armaments for
‘collective security’, ‘No’
to armed forces for national defence”. [p.312]

“Anyone can see what the position is. The Government
simply cannot make up their mind, or they cannot get
the Prime Minister to make up his mind, so they go on
in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved
to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity,
all-powerful to be impotent.” [Winston Churchill, p.321]

Chamberlain
and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of
the Second World War (Making of the Twentieth
Century)
by R.A.C. Parker

“Tony explains that Maddie has a job for two
reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors,
the company saves money and minimizes product damage
by having both the precision and non-precision work
done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers
could do Maddie’s job more cheaply, shipping fragile,
half-finished parts to another country for processing
would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper than
a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that
could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and
place them precisely in a laser welder.[...] For Tony,
it’s simple: Maddie makes less in two years than
the machine would cost, so her job is safe—for
now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper,
or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard
starts running three shifts, then investing in those
robots might make sense. ”
—
“It’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances
would reverse recent trends and bring large numbers
of jobs for unskilled laborers back to the U.S. Our
efforts might be more fruitfully focused on getting
Maddie the education she needs for a better shot at
a decent living in the years to come. Subsidized job-training
programs tend to be fairly popular among Democrats and
Republicans, and certainly benefit some people. But
these programs suffer from all the ills in our education
system; opportunities go, disproportionately, to those
who already have initiative, intelligence, and—not
least—family support.

“I never heard Maddie blame others for her situation;
she talked, often, about the bad choices she made as
a teenager and how those have limited her future. I
came to realize, though, that Maddie represents a large
population: people who, for whatever reason, are not
going to be able to leave the workforce long enough
to get the skills they need. Luke doesn’t have
children, and his parents could afford to support him
while he was in school. Those with the right ability
and circumstances will, most likely, make the right
adjustments, get the right skills, and eventually thrive.
But I fear that those who are challenged now will only
fall further behind. To solve all the problems that
keep people from acquiring skills would require tackling
the toughest issues our country faces: a broken educational
system, teen pregnancy, drug use, racial discrimination,
a fractured political culture.”

“A "wiki" approach to designing the
curriculum that would allow teachers and experts to
collaborate in tailoring lessons for schools is being
proposed by the education secretary, Michael Gove.”
—
“The wiki approach would be extended to other
subjects after being piloted in the government's new
programme of study for computer science, Gove said.”

“[...] At this point, any self-respecting Member
of Parliament would be entitled to say: “Wait
a minute! You are trying to change the rules by which
our head of state is chosen and controlled. Is this
good for her and her heirs? Is it good for our country?
I am going to ask some difficult questions.”

“Here, for example, is one. Suppose the heir
to the throne does marry a Catholic, which, under the
new rules, he/she will be permitted to do. Suppose that
they have a child. Suppose the child, as the Catholic
Church requires, is brought up a Catholic. Under the
law, even as reformed, that child cannot become Monarch.
“Are you asking me,” the doubting MP might
inquire, “to vote for a reform which could precipitate
a constitutional-cum-religious crisis?” ”
—
“The change in the sex rules is not easy either.
Nowadays, most people broadly think that men and women
should have equal rights. But how well do such notions
fit in a hereditary system? Why should the oldest (of
either sex) take all? How can you defend any hereditary
system once you get really modern?”